Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan Essay examples

Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan Essay examples

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Traditions, heritage and culture are three of the most important aspects of Chinese culture. Passed down from mother to daughter, these traditions are expected to carry on for years to come. In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, daughters Waverly, Lena, Rose and June thoughts about their culture are congested by Americanization while on their quests towards self-actualization. Each daughter struggles to find balance between Chinese heritage and American values through marriage and professional careers.
June’s story dealt with the concepts of superstition and cultural differences. The beginning of the chapter, June is describing a necklace given to her by her mother. The pendant was, “too large, too green, too garishly ornate” (pg. 197. June). Her mother Suyuan entitled it the “life importance” for her daughter, but because June did not appreciate it, the reader can identify the cultural differences between the two, as well as the importance of material items. After the death of Suyuan, June begins to realize that the “life importance” is actually a testimony of love from her mother.
“For a long time, I wanted to give you this necklace. See, I wore this on my skin, so when you put it on your skin, then you know my meaning. This is your life’s importance.” (pg. 208)
By finally giving the life importance to June, Suyuan is finally expressing that she is no longer comparing June to Waverly. She is finally letting her know that she accepts her for who she is, and how great of a person she is.
In “Without Wood”, Rose Jordan was unable to find a balance between herself and her need to please everyone around her, especially her husband, Ted. Her mother believed that Rose was lacking the element Wood, translating into the fact that Rose ...

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...nts, Ying-Ying predicts that Lena will be unable to control her future life if she does not “finish her rice”. Snowballing into a need for control over her environment, Lena fails to accomplish what she has worked so hard to fight for, and marries a man named Harold, who controls their marriage by demanding equality between everything they do and own. Unable to see the unbalance is her marriage, Ying-Ying is forced to show Lena by comparing it to a table created by Harold.
“Fallen down,’ she says simply. She doesn’t apologize.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say, and I start to pick up the broken glass shards. ‘I knew it would happen.’
‘Then why you don’t stop it?’ asks my mother. And it was such a simple question” (p.165)
After the table breaks that day, Lena finally comes to the realization about her marriage and what her mother had been talking about the whole time.

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- “With time and maturity, Tan says, she gained a sense of pride in her heritage and formed a connection with her mother” (“The Joy Luck Club” 235). Like their author, the daughters in The Joy Luck Club experience a transformation in attitude towards their mothers and China over the course of the story, but the essential theme is more universal than that. Through the relationships of Chinese-born mothers and their American-born daughters, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club speaks to not only generational and cultural struggles within immigrant families but the struggle of all people to discover a unique identity.... [tags: Family, Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club]

- Lost In Time Amy Tan 's novel, The Joy Luck Club, explores the relationships and experiences of four Chinese mothers with that of their four Chinese-American daughters. The differences in the upbringing of those women born around the 1920’s in China, and their daughters born in California in the 80’s, is undeniable. The relationships between the two are difficult due to lack of understanding and the considerable amount of barriers that exist between them. At the beginning of the novel, Suyuan Woo begins telling the story of The Joy Luck Club, a group started by a small family of Chinese women during World War II, where "we feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the bes... [tags: Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club, China]

- Amy Tan, the author of The Joy Luck Club, displays life lessons mothers pass down to their daughters through the character An-mei, while Janice Mirikitani mirrors the morales presented in Tan’s novel through her own work, “For a Daughter Who Leaves”. The Joy Luck Club follows a series of mothers and their daughters and how they perceive and react to the cultural gap between them. An-mei’s story follows her through her life in China and her new life in America. In China, she witnesses the abuse her mother goes through and eventually her mother’s suicide.... [tags: Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club, The Joy Luck Club]

- Amy Tan's “The Joy Luck Club” The “Joy Luck Club,” by Amy Tan, is a collection of short stories about the relationships between Chinese born mothers and their American born daughters. The story called “Four Directions” is about a woman named Waverly Jong. The story is about Waverly trying to tell her mother that she is getting married to a American man named Richard. Waverly was a chess champion as while she was a young girl and she remembers the strategy that she used in her matches, and in her life, as she tries to tell her mother about a marriage to an American man.... [tags: Amy Tan Joy Luck Club Essays]

- Chinese Culture vs. American Culture in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club An author's cultural background can play a large part in the authors writing. Amy Tan, a Chinese-American woman, uses the cultural values of Chinese women in American culture in her novel, The Joy Luck Club. These cultural values shape the outcome of The Joy Luck Club. The two cultural value systems create conflict between the characters. In The Joy Luck Club, the chapter "Waiting Between the Trees" illustrates major concerns facing Chinese-American women.... [tags: Amy Tan The Joy Luck Club]

- Mother-Daughter Communication in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club Of the many stories involving the many characters of "The Joy Luck Club", I believe the central theme connecting them all is the inability of the mothers and their daughters to communicate effectively. The mothers all have stories of past struggles and hard times yet do not believe their daughters truly appreciate this fact. The mothers of the story all want their daughters to never have to go through the struggles they themselves had to go through, yet they are disappointed when their daughters grow up and do not exhibit the respect or strength of their mothers. This is the ironic paradox of the story. T... [tags: Joy Luck Club Essays Amy Tan Papers]

- A Daughter Pushed to the Brink in Joy Luck Club In Amy Tan's novel, Joy Luck Club, the mother of Jing-mei recognizes only two kinds of daughters: those that are obedient and those that follow their own mind. Perhaps the reader of this novel may recognize only two types of mothers: pushy mothers and patient mothers. The two songs, "Pleading Child" and "Perfectly Contented," which the daughter plays, reinforce the underlying tension in the novel. These songs represent the feelings that the daughter, Jing-mei, has had throughout her life.... [tags: Joy Luck Club Essays Amy Tan Papers]

- Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club Parents always want what is best for their children, regardless of culture or ethnicity. In The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan, and in "Life With Father" by Itabari Njeri, the parents express their parental methods upon their daughters. Children will all react differently to their parent's methods, as do Waverly, June, and Itabari, but they still share a common resentment for their parents. It is shown in the two stories how parental methods expressed to children can be misinterpreted, thus influencing the child's behavior.... [tags: The Joy Luck Club Essays]

- Throughout The Joy Luck Club Amy Tan inserts various conflicts betweens mothers and daughters. Most of these relationships, already very fragile, become distanced through heritage, history and expectations. These differences cause reoccurring clashes between two specific mother-daughter bonds. The first relationship exists between Waverly Jong and her mother, Lindo. Lindo tries to instill Chinese qualities in her daughter while Waverly refuses to recognize her heritage and concentrates on American culture.... [tags: The Joy Luck Club Essays]

- The Power of Love in Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, Four pairs of mothers and daughters embark on the journey that is life. Each young woman comes to realize how valuable the relationships with their mothers are. As each daughter learns from her mother, she goes through the sometimes-painful process of trying to understand her enigmatic mother. To finally unravel the mystery surrounding their mothers is to understand who they, themselves, really are. Suyuan Woo started the "Joy Luck Club" the year she left China. She began the club as a relief from the heartache that she and her friends experienced "My mother could sense that the wome... [tags: Joy Luck Club Essays]